The madness rolled through an anonymous breakfast bar in Arlington, just outside Dallas, soon after six o’clock on Tuesday morning. Sleepy diners gazed at a bank of television screens which had lit up with images of two contrasting men on the early morning NBC news. In front of them a suave anchorman promised that Friday night’s manufactured scrap in north Texas between “the 58-year-old boxing icon Iron Mike Tyson and the Problem Child, Jake Paul,” will transport us “back to the glory days of boxing”.
As if we needed any more convincing the screen then filled with the scraggly bearded face of Paul, “the 27-year-old YouTube sensation”, who praised the owners of the Dallas Cowboys for sharing his vision of staging “the biggest fight in the history of boxing” at their AT&T Stadium just 10 miles down the road from where we sat drinking our lukewarm coffee.
We did not hear the ghosts of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali howling in agony. Instead, if they had been forced to hear the blabbering inanity of the world in 2024, they might have laughed.
Twelve hours later, at the Toyota Music Factory in Irving, a 20-minute drive from Arlington, Tyson and Paul staged a public workout to kickstart this surreal fight week which will culminate in fisticuffs on Netflix. Tyson was said to be “ferocious” as he backed his cornerman against the ropes. The trainer wore a body protector which absorbed the blows while Tyson showed decent head movement as he threw some relatively fast combinations. But it’s easy for a former world champion when no one is punching back.
Tyson looked weary after that burst of activity and it’s hard to know how he will cope with eight two-minute rounds against a man 31 years younger than him. Paul is a novice professional but Tyson looked sombre as he waited to be interviewed in the ring.
A black towel was draped around his bare shoulders as a young woman turned to the crowd. “Texas, you better get louder than that,” she hollered. Sweat poured down Tyson’s sad old face as he waited patiently.
“Mr Mike Tyson, it is so different when you’re on your phone or watching it online, to witness it here,” the woman said enthusiastically as she praised his brief workout. “It is something spectacular that I don’t think any of us have ever seen before.”
I remembered the last time I had been alone with Tyson and his trainers, in a gym in Las Vegas in 1991. It was a closed sparring session and, before I interviewed him, he worked with Jesse Ferguson. When they had fought five years earlier, Tyson said he’d tried to drive Ferguson’s nose into his brain before knocking him out.
That same unhinged malevolence in Tyson remained in 1991 and it was disconcerting to watch him rip left hooks into Ferguson’s sagging midriff and long right crosses to the jaw with serious intent. The power of those punches sprayed the air with sweat and water as if Tyson had hit a small geyser hidden inside his sparring partner’s skull. Feeling some of that sticky wetness on my face I retreated to a safe distance.
Tyson seemed scary but his best years as a fighter were already behind him. The fighter I watched that afternoon was not a patch on the world champion who, in 1988, obliterated the previously outstanding Michael Spinks with a display of fury and skill that, for the 91 seconds it lasted, captured the magnetism of boxing.
Thirty-six years on from that career high, Tyson was asked what he had learned about himself since he began training for Paul. The former Baddest Man on the Planet paused and then said: “That I’m tougher than I believed I was because, when I agreed to this fight and started training, I thought: ‘What the fuck was I thinking of?’ But I’ve finished the process. The fight is the party. All the hard work is done.”
Tyson was reminded that Netflix has 282 million subscribers and he is expected to fight in front of the biggest crowd of his career on Friday night. He was asked if he had ever thought such a night would entail him fighting Jake Paul.
He shook his head forlornly and spread his hands wide. “Never in a million years,” Tyson said in his soft, lisping voice.
Tyson was asked about his family and, perhaps a little hard of hearing these days, murmured: “Say that once again, please.”
He eventually made a little joke that all ageing dads could understand: “To my children I’m nobody … they take me for granted. They talk a lot of mess to me that nobody else would.”
But he was smiling when he suggested that, on Friday night, “they’re going to find out their father is very special”.
Tyson, who understands the historical magnitude of Johnson, Louis and Ali, and his own lesser place in the heavyweight pantheon, was asked what it would mean if he could beat Paul. Admirably, he did not deign to answer the question.
“All I can say is ‘Thank you God,’” Tyson said.
He was long gone when the same woman introduced “the disrupter, the man who has revolutionised boxing in four years … the most influential figure in boxing today … it’s the Problem Child, Jake ‘El Gallo’ Paul!”
Wearing a red rooster wig, in homage to his nickname in Puerto Rico where he now lives, Paul cut an absurd and chunky figure. After his leaden workout he said: “I feel really good, sharp, powerful and explosive. It’s going to be a short night for Mike.”
But he admitted that his mother, who is obviously old enough to remember the terror Tyson once spread through boxing, was worried. “She’s nervous. She doesn’t like watching Mike Tyson throw punches because she’s a little scared.”
The YouTuber dressed as a rooster turned to his mother and said: “But Mom, I promise you, I was built for this, I was destined for this. I, Jake Joseph Paul, will knock out Mike Tyson, November 15. It’s written in the fucking history books.”
